(You guys loves her so much during the screenshot contest for midsummer festival that we convinced her to bring a few of her other skills to DYS - our first entry from Fran Molina!)

Herbalism is usually an over-looked profession. People usually pick up Mining to make money, because of the synergy mining has with various professions in the game.

What many people don’t know is that Herbalism has a huge market too, because of the always high demand on Alchemist Potions. Although Herbalism doesn’t have as many synergies as Mining does, you can make a good amount of gold from it as well.

In this guide I’ll teach you how to farm Terokkar Forest, and the trees from Skettis. Terokkar Forest may be considered the zone with the highest potential for making money with Herbalism in the entire game, because of the huge variety of herbs.

We always start with a route, right? Routes are the easiest way to farm herbs. It’s much better to follow a path you know to get your nodes easily than just going around at random.

So, this is the route I use to farm my herbs. You can get the Gatherer Add-On (http://www.gathereraddon.com/) to help you track your herbs, but once you’re accustomed  to your route, it’s no longer needed.

There are herbs that spawn in Cenarion Thicket, Veil Shienor, Veil Reskk, and Firewing Point. The fact is, I don’t find as many herbs in these places as in the places I pointed out on my route. If you are luckier than me, then props to you! This is an example of a basic route, feel free to use it and change to suit your needs.

Quick description on the herbs you can pick up in Terokkar:

• Felweed is a common herb in Outland, and can be found in every zone. It usually spawns out in the open, or near other small plants. You use Felweed for the basic Super Mana/Healing Potions, and popular Elixirs like Adept’s Elixir or Elixir or Major Agility. You need a skill of 300 Herbalism to pick it up.

• Dreaming Glory is usually found at the feet of mountains. They’re used for Super Mana Potions, and Elixirs related to Regenerating Health or Mana. Because of those properties, when you pick a Dreaming Glory you’ll gain a buff that regenerates 30 Health every 5 seconds for 15 minutes. 315 Herbalism is required to pick this herb.

• Terocone is a kind of a rare herb. It spawns only in Terokkar Forest and on Arakkoa settlements in Shadowmoon Valley, making it a nice money-maker. They usually spawn on the feet of the big Olemba Trees. You use it for the really useful Haste Potion, and various Elixirs that are always in demand; requires 325 Herbalism.

• Mana Thistle is a plant that used to spawn only in places accessible by flying. This plant is used for most of the flasks in TBC and all the Resistance Cauldrons. They aren’t called “Mana” Thistle just for nothing; upon picking a Mana Thistle, you gain up to 3500 mana!

What you will need:

• At least 360 Herbalism, to be able to herb the Skettis Trees that are lv72, although I do recommend 375 so you will never fail a pick-up. If you can wear leather, you can ask for a Leatherworker to craft a pair of Herbalist’s Gloves (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=7349) to help you.

• 300 Riding Skill and a Flying Mount.

I usually start in Allerian Stronghold, then go to Bonechewer Ruins and fly my way to Skettis. In Skettis, I usually do 2 laps to look for Skettis Trees (hoping to make some more cash!), then fly down to Veil Shalas and continue on my way following my usual route.

Pick every herb you see. Even if they aren’t worth a lot (like Mana Thistle), it’s still money, and there’s a chance of getting a Fel Lotus on every herb you pick up. Fel Lotus is a rare herb that grows along with Outland Herbs, and can be gathered when you gather any other herb. You use them as a reagent for all the flasks that were added with The Burning Crusade.

What are those “Skettis Trees”?

Those famous trees are mobs called Talonsworn Forest-Rager http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=23029 which wander around Skettis. They don’t drop great loot when killed, but an Herbalist can really get full benefit from them! They drop 2-5 Motes of Life every kill, and 4-8 herbs of many kinds, except for Netherbloom and Nightmare Vine.

They have 4 different spawn points, and there’s a maximum of 2 trees spawned at a time. Here is a basic map with the approximate spawn points and their initial patrolling path.

Although they are lv71-72 Elites, they’re pretty easy to solo with any class. The only thing that would make things hard is their Thunderclap ability, which slows attack and movement speed, and that can make a melee toon’s life hard.

Here’s a small video I made on how to kill it as a BM Hunter, also demonstrating the loot quality of the trees:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyuOowmef6E

On highly populated servers, the Talonsworn Forest-Ragers can be pretty hard to find, so I’d recommend you to alternate between killing those and picking herbs from Terokkar. But if you’re virtually alone (which usually happens during off-peak times, or on low population server), you can stay around Skettis and farm only those, picking the Dreaming Glories and Mana Thistles on the way.

And now, with this small guide, you’re ready to start dominating the herbalism market on your server.

Have you subscribed to Dominate Your Server yet? Our subscribers are eligible for contests and giveaways that non-subscribers don't get access to. Click Here to Subscribe!

17 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Let’s talk about the grind of leveling a little bit. The really fun stuff only starts at level 70; and that dead period starting at about level 30 where you nearly have to live in Stranglethorn Vale is something we all hate once we’ve done it a few times.

The are two ways to take the pain out of leveling and do it faster and more efficiently than you ever thought possible. Joanna’s guide brags about making it from 1-60 in 6 days played time. But when you look at the rest of his characters they are a much more modest 7 or 8 days played time to level 60. Still sounds fast right? You can do it too, without having to memorize every quest in the game and without having done it a hundred times before. Guys like that spend all their time doing only that. They love creating new characters on new servers and racing everybody to level 70. Not me, that’s the grind part, unfortunately it must be done.

Now, keep in mind that Gavin and I are working on making leveling a serious breeze even going solo.  (And Gavin is going to hit 70 WAY faster than 6 days!)  Our horde leveling guide is going to walk you through every single step from 1-80.  That’s right, I said 80, more on that in the next few days.

Gavin is a solo nut.  He gets a real thrill out of leveling which is just not my bag.  I prefer another method.  It took me some time to convince him to try it with me, and I’m not sure he’ll ever like it as much as going solo, but at least he can see what I mean now.  The screenshot for this post is Gavin and me as we worked on our quest pathing in Hellfire.

There are other things much more fun about this game than making leveling itself a race. It’s also really hard to do un-twinked. If you are starting from scratch on a new server, it’s tough to level really fast because you have to spend at least a little time gathering and selling something or you’ll be too broke to afford repairs and get your training.

Furthermore, I hate getting one character all the way to level 70 and then stopping and going back to level 1 with another toon and having to do it all over again. There’s a better way of doing it. There are two parts to this – two rules I level by. The first rule is: never quest out of rest. The second one: Never roll alone.

Don’t Quest Out of Rest.

If you will create three or four toons on your account, plus one banker, you can pretty much play all the time and almost never run out of rested experience bonus. When you kill mobs under the rested bonus you get 200% experience. Plus, if you combine it with questing you can get almost two full levels of experience from one full bar of rest. That’s because every time you turn in a quest, it pushes your rest bar further along since you are gaining experience without killing anything.

One quest turn-in generally speaking is about the same as killing ten mobs at a minimum at low levels, the higher you go the more a quest turn in is worth in relationship to time. If you are killing mobs about the right level you can get one or two lines per ten kills up to about level 30 or so. So if you do 5 quests and kill 125-150 mobs, that’s 1 level - especially at lower levels.

If you are killing a mob every 10-20 seconds that’s 3-6 kills per minute, meaning you can gain a level every hour or so as long as you don’t run out of quests to do. This will work up to about level 20, and then it’s going to take you up to two hours per level. Past level 30 you can count on about three hours a level, around 40 will take four hours, after 50 nearly five hours; and watch out for level 65 plus, they take some time.

If you just can’t stand it and have to do something with your toon and you’re out of rest, use that time for farming (which I never do) or grinding for rep, or running instances for gear.   Of course, there isn’t much of a need any more to grind out rep until you hit 70 anyway, so if you must go looking for herbs or something do those kinds of things when your rested bonus ends.  Since I never farm you can see why I can make a hard and fast rule that I just don’t do much of anything out of rest.

Just for grins let’s say you follow my rule and never quest out of rest much. How long will it take to hit level 70 if you can average the leveling times I listed above? Seven days 5 hours. Considering even Brian Kopp is showing some of his toons hitting 60 in 6 days, that’s pretty good! Seven days playing it easy too. We’re not talking about trying to achieve perfection or break any records. Just by questing in rest, you can take your time and have some fun. Run a few instances and do a profession; help out a friend or two along the way – keep it a game for Pete’s sake! This brings us to rule number two.

Never roll alone.

Now you can certainly go from level one to around level ten much faster solo questing. You might even go up to 16 or even 20, but after that I recommend going questing in a group of two. Two people can kill mobs 125% faster than you can alone. Even though you have to share experience, if you are questing in the rest bonus it’s the same amount of experience you would be getting if you were feeling “normal!” Plus; if you can kill 100 mobs per hour alone (if the mobs are your level or lower) you will be able to kill about 225–250 mobs per hour with a friend. And you will be killing mobs up to two levels higher than you. This means you can take another day or so off of your leveling time to level 65 just by doing everything with a buddy.

Even if you don’t buy the argument that it’s faster in leveling time, you can certainly agree that two people with some skill can do almost anything but run instances.  You can bag every rare elite you come across, do all of the team quests, and even quest in areas two to three levels higher than you could solo.  Plus, it’s just a LOT more fun.

Sure, you have to kill twice as many mobs for the loot quests that require you to get 10 of something, but it will end up taking less time to get 20 for two people than it would for one person to get 10 by himself. I can pretty much count on getting a ding every time I sit down to play, most of the time two, on every character I log in without having to grind it out for hours at a time.

As an added bonus, if you are cycling through characters like this, by the time you are done you’ve got three or four level 70 characters with awesome gear ready for just about anything and probably less than 25 days played time. Now THAT sounds like a lot of time, but my first toon didn’t hit level 70 until 23 days played time (dang I was a nub). Granted, it was faster the next time out, but both of my first 2 70’s took me more than 30 days. If I had known this back then I could have had four or five level 70’s in the same amount of played time.

The other really cool thing about playing with a friend is that you’ve got some good company and many things that will make you mad trying to do solo are almost too easy with two players. So get back to having a good time and have more of it - quest under rest and roll with your crew. It will bring the fun back into the greatest game around.

Have you subscribed to Dominate Your Server yet? Our subscribers are eligible for contests and giveaways that non-subscribers don't get access to. Click Here to Subscribe!

33 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

From time to time I remember Benjamin Buford Blue (Bubba) from the movie “Forest Gump” as he went through all the dozens of ways you could cook shrimp.  It’s one of my all-time favorite movie bits.  While I can’t say that there are hundreds of things you can do with a bear flank, I do “know everything there is to know about cookin” them.

The reason I chose these as a tip is because these two recipes have a very different buff from most cooked foods until you get to the Outlands recipes.  The other reason is that it’s pretty easy to get the bear flanks, so these two recipes make sense for almost every class if stamina, spirit or just a little health regen is not your main concern.  Finally, these recipes were only added in patch 2.4 so many of you may not even know they exist.

There are two reasons for using food from cooking.  One is to regenerate health, although it’s often easier to simply buy food from vendors for that.  The other reason is for the buffs.  A hefty number of the cooking recipes give you a boost to stamina and spirit if you spend 10 seconds eating, but there are others that have different variations on the food buff theme.

Bear Burgers and Bear Kabobs are one of only a few old world recipes that give buffs that are different from stam/spirit.  And these two buffs can be pretty useful.  Combine that with the fact that neither of these recipes require a spice to make, and it’s a winner.

Now, some will argue that the best non SS food buff from old world foods is the recipe for greater Sagefish, Sagefish Delight.  The problem with this is that Raw Greater Sagefish are a pain in the butt to get since they can only be fished from schools.  But bear flanks drop from 11 different mobs in four different zones.

Combine these things with the other fact that bear flanks are normally available in fairly high quantities for really low prices on most servers and it’s certainly something you should consider picking up if you’ve leveled cooking - which I highly recommend.

Part of this phenomenon is because this recipe was only added in patch 2.4, so those guys already in Outlands tend to ignore them; as well as folks who are just rushing through on their way to Outlands.  The recipe was added to help you level cooking from 250-300 without having to fish or cook fish to do so.

I already did a series on fishing and cooking because it’s the best combo to speed up the leveling cooking process, but if you’re one of those people who just refuses to suffer the time sink of fishing you are going to need these recipes - and the nice thing is that the benefits are terrific in every direction.

Here’s what these two recipes look like from wowhead:

I had Lawbringer stir us up a batch of these things while we were leveling through the 50’s, and we still keep some around now that we’re in Outlands until he gets those killer fish recipes.  As a hunter, the +24 attack power is terrific, while Lawbringer’s Shadow Priest get a sweet little +14 to all spells.  That’s the equivalent of wearing another blue item with those stats for each of us.

You can purchase these new recipes in Felwood at the Alliance and Horde General Goods vendors in each faction base.  Malygor is the Alliance vendor and Bale is “FOR THE HORDE!” 

Kudos to Lawbringer for grabbing these and recognizing that they were new as we ran like mad through the Felwood segment.  We picked up enough flanks in Felwood, Winterspring and Western Plaguelands to last us quite some time, and we put that buff on every 15 minutes or so while questing.

All in all, it’s easy to get the mats for these, gives a nifty buff, and will help you non-fishing style folks gain a couple dozen points to your cooking skill = win.  Go Dominate, and may the bear never get YOU.

Have you subscribed to Dominate Your Server yet? Our subscribers are eligible for contests and giveaways that non-subscribers don't get access to. Click Here to Subscribe!

5 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

If all has gone well with your arena preparation, and your opening tactics have put your opponent on the back foot, it becomes time to hunt for your first arena kill of the match.

There are many ways in which you can force a kill against the other team, each with their own complexities of execution, ranging from the simple to the devious, listed here are just a few of the most popular ways of squeezing that kill in past the enemy healers.

Drain them dry

By far the simplest method of winning an arena match is to outlast your opponents’ mana pool; while lacking any particular flair it is effective. Through a mixture of mana drains and healing efficiency de buffs such as wounding poison you can ensure that your target can no longer be healed simply because of a lack of mana.

Many an even fight in which no team can tactically gain the upper hand comes down to a mana war such as this; particularly with defensive orientated teams accompanied by many healers. It is important to ensure you are capable of winning in the outlasting game to prevent a slow and frustrating loss.

Control the healers

This method is generally the standard way a kill is earned in the arena. It relies on your team having moderate burst capabilities and crowd control skills.

Simply use a crowd control ability on an opposing healer when your designated kill target is moderately low on health to prevent heals from landing. Typically your kill target will be another healer if present allowing you to easily interrupt further heals.

This method is simple to execute and the one most teams utilise when starting out so as a healer it is important to learn how to defend yourself from enemy crowd control by attempting to stay out of line of sight from enemy crowd controllers.

Split DPS

Slightly more complex is a split DPS method, most healers have emergency healing measures that can rapidly heal one target or mitigate large amounts of damage to one target. Many healers however struggle to heal multiple people efficiently.
As such, by splitting your DPS between two targets when the opposing team has a low amount of healing power can cause them to rapidly be overloaded when concentrated damage could be countered.

Target switching

Reliant on fast reactions from your team to voice communicated information, target switching is by far one of the most effective methods of claiming a kill and is commonly how tournaments level teams win matches.

The premise is that your DPS can switch target faster than the enemy healers can react. With enough burst damage you can have a target down to low health before the opposite team get a chance to react. Coupled with well timed crowd control or preliminary damage from a split DPS tactic and kills can come thick and fast.

This is the tactic that all teams should aspire to learn, but it does require your team to have competent leadership as timing is everything.

The almighty Cyclone

This tactic is only available if you have a Druid in your team and requires precise timing to work. The plan is to hit your target with a large burst of damage to get him low on health, normally he would then be healed up but by landing a cyclone you prevent him being healed.

From there you have 6 seconds to line up a killing burst of damage as soon as cyclone breaks so timing is everything; time your attack too late and heals will land preventing the kill, time it too soon and your attack will do no damage.

While complex, this is my favourite personal tactic for 5v5 arena and is a fantastic way of stealing a kill from under the noses of teams with a high amount of healers.

Using the right tactic at the right time is pivotal to success in the arena, but now fully informed, you should be able to put them into practice with your own teams as you prepare to dominate all who stand before you.

Have you subscribed to Dominate Your Server yet? Our subscribers are eligible for contests and giveaways that non-subscribers don't get access to. Click Here to Subscribe!

31 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Recently the non disclosure agreement surrounding the next expansion to World of Warcraft was lifted and beta testing has begun. Over the past few days a flood of new information has come forth regarding all aspects of the game and many things have slipped through relatively unnoticed in the excitement.

While it would be entirely possible to run through each class reviewing the upcoming changes in depth, let us instead look at a few of the key changes to game play mechanics that will have a widespread effect throughout the game for a vast majority of classes.

Spell power

Rather than there being separate stats for improving a spells’ damage or healing capability, Blizzard has combined both statistics together into the new spell power stat. In turn the coefficients for all spells have been adjusted, particularly for healing spells since there is no longer a pure healing stat.

The net change of this is that a healer will be receiving a vast increase to their damage capabilities, while offensive hybrid casters will be able to heal far more effectively than before.

Hit/Crit/Haste

All three of the above stats have been consolidated; no longer will there be separate hit, crit or haste stats for melee and spell casters, instead both your melee attacks and spells will benefit at the same time.

This mechanics changes is massive for any hybrid capable of both melee and spell attacks such as paladins and shaman. As an example of how big an impact this may have, enhancement shaman will be able to obtain a decent crit rate to their shocks; this in turn can be combined with the talent elemental devastation for brutal synergy.

Note that this only applies to the raw stats of those individual statistics, critical strike chance increases due to stats such as intelligence or agility will still only apply to either spells or melee.

Threat

Blessing of salvation has been radically changed and so many classes which relied on it for threat reduction may be in a bit of a panic about how threat management could be an issue in WotLK.

Fear not however, tanks in the expansion have had their threat multipliers boosted in compensation; for instance a warrior’s basic defensive stance now boosts threat generated by 45% rather than the current 30%. Equally, threat reduction talents for all dps classes are now present and much easier to access.

Raid Wide Abilities

Many effects which only had an impact on your own group have now been changed to be beneficial to your entire raid. Auras and totems will now be beneficial to all those nearby but the change does not only apply to buffs.

Several healing spells will affect raid members nearby regardless of grouping and many of the new abilities such as a paladin’s Judgement of the Wise talent, will affect raid members too.

The net impact will be a much wider variety of group compositions along with more fluid PvP combat within battlegrounds where groups naturally get split apart and group composition is generally random.

Have you subscribed to Dominate Your Server yet? Our subscribers are eligible for contests and giveaways that non-subscribers don't get access to. Click Here to Subscribe!

32 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

A light went on for me a few days ago as I was feverishly working on my current speed leveling run.  I always run a hunter for speed runs and I don’t take a single second longer than I absolutely have to for anything.  That means I’m not spending precious time at the ah looking for every teeny tiny gear upgrade, or anything else for that matter.

As a result, I can end up having mana issues.  I’m not able to spend the time to get all the exactly right gear and spec MM to make that sort of issue go away, since that would defeat the purpose of trying to break records anyway.  Think about it, if I can save just 5 minutes in every level it will take 5 hours and 45 minutes off the total time.  So spending even 10 minutes running to the nearest AH to get minor gear upgrades is completely out of the question.

But taking 10 seconds between every six to ten fights or so to mana back up is also a time killer.  But if you back off on your skill shots, you don’t mow them down as fast - you can see the dilemma.  Kill fast = more down time to drink.  Slow down a touch = slowing down (I hate that).  But I found a really nice little exploit for this issue.  It doesn’t work for more than 10 levels or so.  But at levels 51-60, when the quests all seem like gathering quests, a little speed boost to down-time is just the ticket.

So whilst I was speeding through Azeroth wondering how to better manage my mana drain, I had to go to Org to turn in a quest in the valley of honor.  And then it hit me: Alterac Manna Biscuits!  I logged out for a minute to check Wowhead for these little nuggets of goodness.  Here’s the tale of the tape:

See that?  4410 health AND 4410 mana on one food.  Well I didn’t waste another second, I logged back in, jumped into an AV and bought 10 stacks of these.  A little pricey, but well worth it.  At level 52 these things will fill up your mana bar in about 5-7 seconds, talk about speeding things up!

You’ll notice that you can’t use these until level 51, so it’s a bummer for you until then.  You can’t join AV before level 51 anyway, so you just have to wait until then.  These are available at Gruunda Wolfheart for horde in Frostwolf Village, and Gaelden Hammersmith in Dun Baldar for Alliance.

A little more research showed that there is not anything to compare to the Alterac Manna Biscuit (AMB’s) until well into outlands and level 60.  So for ten levels I’ve got the very best thing available to fill my mana bar - so fast, in fact, that I can just sit down to munch and send my pet to the next mob.  I can virtually fight non-stop all the way to Hellfire.

Now I was looking at this from the purely mana-regeneration perspective, since I normally don’t have a lot of health damage running on the hunter.  These things are a great boost to all the mana-using classes as we will see below.  But there are also big benefits to the warrior and rogue who have no other way to heal themselves after a tough fight than by using bandages or food if they are running solo.

As a matter of fact, you might think that the only class that might not get a big boost from these is the mage.  Mages get to conjure all their food and water for free, but until they get to train rank 7 of conjure food and water at level 60 (Rank 7 food from a drop tome as well), these things are much better than the rank 6 conjured items.  Past that, rank 6 of conjure food and water only regenerate 2148 health or mana, so AMB’s have twice the punch and give health and mana simultaneously!  So every single class wins with AV Manna Biscuits.

So as you slog through the 50’s on your next toon, be sure to hop an AV match and grab some of these, they will certainly do more than anything else out there to keep you on your feet - dominating!

Have you subscribed to Dominate Your Server yet? Our subscribers are eligible for contests and giveaways that non-subscribers don't get access to. Click Here to Subscribe!

18 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Patch 2.4.3 has now gone live on all realms, with it came a couple of rogue tweaks. The big change everyone is talking about though is to the subtlety talent, cheat death.

Before 2.4.3, cheat death would absorb the damage from any attack that would kill the rogue and provide 90% damage immunity for three seconds afterward. This effect could only happen once per minute; however when combined with the rogues’ large repertoire of escape maneuvers, it allowed them to survive long enough to either disengage or receive healing.

The overall impact of this talent was that, when supported by a healer, rogues were nigh impossible to kill in arena combat. As such many rogues with access to high damage PvE kit began to sacrifice survivability stats for damage boosts with little to no consequences as to how durable they actually were.

Due to this combination of high damage from PvE kit coupled with massive survivability without any effort, rogues became one of the most dominant arena classes, being present within most of the top team setups along with seeing widespread use throughout tournament play.

However at the start of Burning Crusade, Blizzard made it clear that their aim was to keep PvE and PvP itemization separate to prevent a relapse to original release WoW where players had to be successful within PvE content to have a high enough standard of equipment to compete in PvP. Cheat death was preventing this ideal from coming into effect for the rogue class.

As such, cheat death is now reliant on resilience and has been toned down in effect. Rather than absorbing the full damage of an attack it will instead reduce you to 10% of your health, and instead of automatically providing 90% damage mitigation it will provide four times the absorption that your resilience rating provides against critical strike damage.

Due to this change, cheat death is largely ineffectual without high levels of resilience. In fact, you now require 443 resilience rating in order to achieve the previous level of 90% damage mitigation; an amount only reachable with full PvP itemization coupled with defensive enchanting or gemming.

With this move, PvE itemization no longer has such a powerful advantage over PvP equipment within the arena. This will lead to a reduction in the damage output of rogues in general due to a shift towards survivability. As a side effect however, new or under-equipped players will be struggling to make cheat death effective for them until they boost resilience levels, making them prime targets for attack within lower rated arenas.

At least that is how the change should work in theory. Unfortunately it seems that cheat death has somehow become bugged and is in many cases only activating after death has occurred, leading to many rogues declaring it a waste of talent points. This will likely be fixed quickly however but for now it may be worth steering clear of the talent.

What this change means for top end arena and tournament effectiveness of rogues, however remains to be seen, but chances are, they won’t be anywhere near as dominating as before.

Have you subscribed to Dominate Your Server yet? Our subscribers are eligible for contests and giveaways that non-subscribers don't get access to. Click Here to Subscribe!

23 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

We did a post on the Artisan cooking quest, as well as a two-part guide to the Artisan Fishing quest.  There was a bigger purpose to all of that.  Some of the best raid buffs come from cooked foods, and even more specifically, cooked fish.  We don’t want you to have to always buy everything from the AH, so here’s how to put those two secondary profession skills together to make leveling cooking a breeze.

(We have yet to find a way to make leveling fishing faster, so you’ll just have to grind that one out)

Cooking fish is the easy way to get from 1-375. The recipes are easier to find, the mats are easier to get. It’s is much faster to fish up 3 or 4 stacks of fish than to grind out 3 or 4 stacks of raptor eggs.

To find where to go to get each type of fish, just click the Thottbot link and then sort the fishing list by clicking the Drop % on the list with the header that says “From Fishing.” These pages will give you the very best location to catch the maximum number of each fish per type.

1 – 50: Brilliant Smallfish = 80. Mats (1 Raw Brilliant Smallfish)

• 80 Raw Brilliant Smallfish

51 – 100: Longjaw Mudsnapper = 80. Mats (1 Raw Longjaw Mudsnapper)

• 80 Raw Longjaw Mudsnapper

101 – 175: Bristle Whisker Catfish = 120. Mats (1 Raw Bristle Whisker Catfish)

• 120 Raw Bristle Whisker Catfish

175 – 225: Rockscale Cod = 80. Mats (1 Raw Rockscale Cod)

• 80 Raw Rockscale Cod

Here you’ll go do your cooking and fishing quests.

226 – 275: Spotted Yellowtail = 80. Mats (1 Raw Spotted Yellowtail)

• 80 Raw Spotted Yellowtail

Before you move on to the next step, go get the Master Cookbook so you don’t have to stop and run all over the world to go get it in the middle of cooking.

276 – 325: Your Choice – or combination of the following = 80.

• Mightfish Steak. Mats (1 Large Raw Mightfish, 1 Hot Spices, 1 Soothing Spices)
• Baked Salmon. Mats (1 Raw Whitescale Salmon, 1 Soothing Spices)

After you reach 325, go get all of the Outlands fish recipes:

• Blackened Trout – Mats (1 Barbed Gill Trout)
• Feltail Delight – Mats (1 Spotted Feltail)
• Blackened Sporefish – Mats (Zangarian Sporefish)
• Grilled Mudfish - Mats (1 Figluster’s Mudfish)
• Poached Bluefish – Mats (1 Icefin Bluefish)
• Golden Fish Sticks – Mats (1 Golden Darter)
• Spicy Crawdad – Mats (1 Furious Crawdad)

Seriously, that’s all there is to it. The Trout and Feltail will get you to 340, the next four to 365, and Spicy Crawdads to 375. Short and sweet – and very Dominating!

Have you subscribed to Dominate Your Server yet? Our subscribers are eligible for contests and giveaways that non-subscribers don't get access to. Click Here to Subscribe!

14 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Back at the release of the arena system and throughout the duration of season 1 there was one rule of thumb, DoTs were king. Resilience never used to reduce DoT damage and as such warlocks and shadow priests dominated almost every bracket due to overwhelming amounts of shadow damage.

A counter however was found as people began to access The Black Temple. Shadow resist kit began to see widespread use throughout top end arena which caused the end of the domination of shadow caster classes.

As time has gone on though it is no longer possible to swap into resist sets mid arena fight and resilience now affects DoTs. But is the same principle still applicable? Can spell resist be just as effective now or in the future for high end PvP?

While it is no longer possible to equip yourself with pure resist kit specifically tailored to the opponent you are fighting, there are a number of options available to you for increasing your spell resist without significantly reducing your combat capability.

The first consideration before thinking of going for a spell resist build is your basic resist level, paladin auras, shaman totems, certain buffs, racial traits and other class abilities all act to provide a good base level to work off when aiming to resist a single spell school. Should you not have access to these skills, it is very hard to reach significant levels of resistance and as such will probably not be worth your while.

The second consideration is just what spell school you would like to become more resistant to. The most potent options are shadow and nature. The other spell schools, while effective in the right situation, only generally apply to mages who have many spell schools to rely upon for damage in an emergency.

Being able to resist shadow spells will give you a degree of protection from mana burns as well as a chance to resist the application of DoTs to yourself and each individual tick of damage, while becoming nature resistant will enable you to resist a druid crowd control along with poisons and a bulk of the damage from elemental shaman or moonkin.

If you have chosen a spell school to aim your spell resist efforts at, and have access to a decent baseline resist, then it is time to work on your equipment. The main way of increasing your resistances is through the resist all stat. This can be found on numerous enchants along with void spheres created by enchanters.

Each void sphere will provide you with 4 spell resist to every spell school and you are able to enchant your cloak or shoulders with a further 7 each with an additional 5 resist to your shield should you have one available. As a blood elf holy Paladin for example it is currently possible to reach a basic 56 resistance to all spell schools with little trouble.

The next step is spell school specific enchants, a glyph on your helm will add 20 resist to any single spell school of your choice. Armour kits with 8 spell resist to a single school are also available for your chest, legs, hands and feet, though your normal leg and hand enchants are more valuable.

By utilizing these single spell school enchants you can reach around 90 spell resist to a single school without buffs or 160 with an aura effect active. This level of spell resist is enough to resist around half of the incoming damage from that spell school and significantly reduce the chance of non damaging effects landing on you, all without using any pure resist equipment. Add the effect of any spell mitigating abilities such as a higher fear resist chance and you can become a formidable opponent for casters which used to be your nemesis.

Unfortunately, with current arena itemization most casters can pickup 74 spell penetration without any real effort severely compromising this tactic for now. With Wrath of the Lich King however, all spell resist abilities will continue to scale and we may see reduced levels of accessibility to spell penetration, possibly allowing for a return of spell resist to competitive PvP.

For now however, the ease of gaining spell penetration prevents its widespread use outside of PvE content.

Have you subscribed to Dominate Your Server yet? Our subscribers are eligible for contests and giveaways that non-subscribers don't get access to. Click Here to Subscribe!

6 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

When you run as many auctions and toons as I do, having enough bag slots can become a serious issue.  I will buy out hundreds of auctions every week for resale, as well as having to manage the items for my rolling auctions as they expire every couple of days.

Add to the auction items the little piles of BoE greens, consumables and commodities (cloth, leather, metal) I pick up while leveling and raiding and it can end up being quite a mess if I didn’t use a toon for the sole purpose of asset management.  If you do everything with your main character log on right this minute and create two more characters to help you with your item management.

Even though I want to tell you how to work your trade mule, let’s start with the concept of using a dedicated banking toon.  On every server and every account I will have a single toon who does nothing but go back and forth from the mailbox to the auction house.

For Alliance choose a Gnome or  Dwarf and run them up to Iron Forge.  Horde players should use a Tauren in Thunder Bluff.  Those cities are simply the best places for commerce because the ah and mailbox are very close together.

Instead of taking time out with your main (or any other alt your are leveling) to do your ah business, always use your banking toon.  This will help more than anything to avoid mistakes and confusion.  Simply mail every single item of value to your banker and then you can deal with the whole pile at a time when you can concentrate on what to do with each piece.

Use your banker to post all your auctions and hold your gold.  I also use my banker to buy items for my toons to use as well.  My main rarely visits the ah, I’ve got more important stuff to do with that guy.

Now that you’ve got a banker, create a mule toon.  With a mule, it makes no difference what race you select although I will normally use a human for Alliance and an orc or troll for horde.  Just run this level 1 toon to the nearest inn with a mailbox and there they will stay forever.

The really neat thing about using a mule is that you can take advantage of a little exploit in the way the mail system works.  This tip will make it so much easier for the new player who doesn’t yet have the gold to blow on a full set of big bags for all their toons.  It will also make life easier for you power ah users since I don’t think we’ll ever get 250 slot bags!

When your banker’s mailbox and bags are jammed full and you’re waiting for the weekend to post all of those goodies at the auction house just use the bulk mail system and mail everything to your mule to hold.  Every mail you send can contain up to 12 items.  You can clear hundreds of items out of your mailbox and bags in just a few minutes.  I also recommend mail mods such as “Open All” and “Postman” to help speed up this process even more.

Once your Mule has everything in the mail you can let it sit there for up to 30 days.  I never leave things in there that long, but that’s the max.  After 30 days, those bulk mail items will just get returned to the banker - it doesn’t even cost you the mail fees!

But here’s the cool trick.  When it’s time to send everything back to your banking toon, just log your mule, open the mail and hit “return.”  You can return hundreds of items to your banker in a few clicks and zero postage fees.

Using the mail this way gives you hundreds - even thousands of absolutely free bag slots.  If you use the mail system to it’s maximum advantage, you’ll never have to worry about running out of space or blowing too much gold on bigger bags before you can really afford to.

You will also know exactly how to handle extra items.  Everything just gets mailed to your banker - simple.  When you have time to concentrate on what to do with everything, your banker will either post items on the ah or mail them to the mule to hold until they are ready to be sold or just to hold if you like.  Your banker will almost always mail things exclusively to your mule, and all your other toons will almost always mail everything to your banker, it makes visiting the mailbox short and sweet.

You’ll notice that the screen shot for this article shows my mule in Booty Bay.  On most servers I keep one mule for each faction in Booty Bay so that I can take advantage of moving things back and forth between Alliance and Horde auction houses.  This is a topic for another time, but if you can stand running your mules to booty bay (multiple deaths are often inevitable, especially for ally) then you really set yourself up for some dominating moves between faction auction houses.

It all sounds too simple once you read through it.  But there are so many players I see on their main toon at the auction house day after day that I thought it would be a great tip for those of you who do not use banking toons and mules up until now.  It will make your life a lot simpler and expand your storage space to near infinity.

Have you subscribed to Dominate Your Server yet? Our subscribers are eligible for contests and giveaways that non-subscribers don't get access to. Click Here to Subscribe!

18 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post